“Fox News has been a powerful engine of climate misinformation for years – so powerful, in fact, that its influence has been named the ‘Fox News Effect’,” Maibach said. Of those, “212 (86%) were dismissive of the climate crisis, cast warming and its consequences in doubt or employed fearmongering when discussing climate solutions”, Public Citizen reported.ĭonald Trump supporters protest a climate crisis summit in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2019.
In 2019, Public Citizen found that in the first half of the year Fox News devoted 247 segments to climate crisis. The tenor of Fox News hosts’ commentary matches with data from Public Citizen, a non-profit thinktank. “If, as I and I’m sure others fear, weather channel downplays the links between global warming and extreme weather, it will only solidify their viewers’ existing biases against climate action.” “It’s been shown that the most important predictors of public support for climate action are understanding that this crisis is real, human-caused, serious and solvable,” Supran said. “The danger of running a weather channel is that if they pervert news about the weather anything like how they’ve perverted news about climate change and energy politics, millions of Americans will be further misled about this crisis,” said Geoffrey Supran, research fellow at Harvard University’s department of the history of science.
Last year, Tucker Carlson rubbished the idea that forest fires on the west coast were a result of climate crisis – serious climate scientists, however, agree that the fires are very much linked to the breakdown – and suggested environmental hazards were a liberal conspiracy.Ĭarlson’s colleague Laura Ingraham has insisted, contrary to experts’ findings, that the planet is in a “natural” cycle of warming, and suggested that environmental activists like Greta Thunberg had been “brainwashed”, while Sean Hannity said the left’s “obsession” with the climate was a “political tool”. Conversely, if it opts to perpetuate misinformation to advance political goals, it will be a huge disservice to all Americans – conservative, liberal and moderate,” Maibach said. “If Fox chooses to use its access and credibility to inform viewers about the realities of climate change and its impacts on the weather, it could be a game changer.
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